Back in the Great Depression, in the days when communism was a gleaming red star that beckoned working-class dreamers from across the sea, 24-year-old Rose Kostyuk packed her bags and moved to Russia. It was an exciting adventure for a spunky young social worker from Philadelphia. Thousands of miles away, the first real socialist state was being hammered together. Idealists everywhere felt a magnetic pull toward this utopian land of Lenin. All the possibilities of a lifetime lay ahead.

V.I. Lenin: Led the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Premier of Council of People's Commissars until he died in office Jan. 21, 1924. Josef Stalin: Longest-ruling Soviet leader; succeeded Lenin. General secretary of the Communist Party from 1922 to 1953. Named chairman of Council of Ministers (or premier) May, 1941. Died in office March 5, 1953. Georgi M. Malenkov: Took over Stalin's post as premier from March, 1953, until February, 1955. Nikita S.

Branislava S. Fridman has been teaching history to Moscow schoolchildren for 41 years, but these days she has to spend three hours a night preparing her lessons. That's because much of what she used to teach now looks more like fiction than history. And Fridman, along with so many other teachers, is searching for the truth.

They have known hard times before, the makers of Soviet encyclopedias. There were all those awkward junctures such as the time when Josef Stalin's infamous chief of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria, fell into disgrace and all Great Soviet Encyclopedia owners were ordered to cut his entry out of the "B" volume and paste in more than anyone could ever want to know about the Bering Strait.

A mass grave containing the bodies of thousands of Buddhist monks killed on the orders of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin has been discovered in western Mongolia, British television reported Tuesday. The grave near the western town of Moron was filled with the remains of monks killed in a brutal suppression of the Lamaist faith under Communist rule, the British Broadcasting Corporation said.

The 32 pupils in Mrs. Sidneva's third-grade class listened with rapt attention Monday as she described how Nazi soldiers shot more than 30,000 people in two days 50 years ago in a wooded area on the edge of Kiev. "The Nazis hated all of us--the Ukrainians, the Russians and the Byelorussians--but who did they hate the most?" Inna M. Sidneva asked the 8- and 9-year-olds sitting erect at their desks. Several hands shot up, and the teacher motioned to a boy sitting in the front row.

A small makeshift cross in a birch forest near this Urals village points to the end of one of Europe's great mysteries. Here, in a small marshy clearing, lies a mass grave with nine bodies, believed to be those of Russia's last czar, Nicholas II; his wife, Alexandra; three of his four daughters and four servants--massacred by a Bolshevik execution squad in the heat of the Communist revolution 73 years ago.

Right in the center of this ancient city once stood a German castle whose twin turret and spire were recognizable all over Europe. Today the castle is a memory, its site occupied by an angular, 25-story behemoth of heavy, gray granite and overwhelming Soviet hideousness. The "House of Communism" has been under construction for 20 years and is still not finished. It may never be.

The embalmed body of V . I. Lenin may soon be removed from the marble mausoleum on Red Square where it has been displayed since his death in 1924. * Leningrad Mayor Anatoly Sobchak proposed that Lenin should be reburied "with all due honors" next to his mother and other relatives in the city's Volkhovskoye Cemetery. The new Soviet legislature will be asked to approve. * The move would have great symbolic impact.

His hands and waxen face lit by a ghostly glow against the black marble walls of his tomb, the goateed founder of the Soviet Union still lay in state on Saturday in his Red Square mausoleum, just as he has for the last 67 years. But outside, among the lines of visitors that police say have suddenly grown longer in the last two weeks, the word was out that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's remaining days above ground are numbered.